Schools that Welcome and Work for Everyone
Modern and inclusive Health Curriculum:
Doug Ford’s reckless decision to drag the health and physical education curriculum into the last century is putting TDSB students at risk. The parts of the 2015 curriculum which have now been removed were necessary to keep pupils safe and help shield them from discrimination. Phil will push to protect TDSB kids -and teachers who do the right thing- by using the TDSB’s own authority to direct teachers to fill the dangerous gaps the provincial government has created. Only an express direction from the TDSB will reassure teachers they won’t fall prey to frivolous professional discipline complaints for from Doug Ford’s “snitch line”.
Education as an Equalizer
Phil Pothen will be a reliable voice at the TDSB in support for existing programs like Model Schools for Inner Cities – and an advocate for new initiatives aimed at ensuring that the TDSB students have a fair and equal opportunity to succeed, regardless of racialization, gender, cultural background, sexual orientation – or their parents’ income. Phil will refuse to let vulnerable students and communities be thrown under the bus in the push for cost savings.
Phil will also push for a more proactive parent engagement and consultation processes that is designed to do a better job of including the voices of low income, immigrant and racialised parents and students – who tend disproportionately to be left out.
Phil will work with allied trustees to make specialized and enrichment programs available at more local schools – so they are accessible to families for whom it is impractical to send their kids to another part of the city.
Safe Transport to School
Every TDSB student deserves a safe walk, bike, wheel or bus ride to school. For most of us, driving our kids to school just isn’t a practical option, and we learn more each year about the negative consequences of children’s physical inactivity. Despite this, the percentage of Toronto parents who let our children walk, wheel or bike themselves to school has fallen precipitously over the past 30 years, while the number of kids who are driven to school has more than doubled. Out of control traffic and unsafe road infrastructure mean that more and more of us feel uncomfortable letting younger kids walk or bike themselves to school unaccompanied.
Safe Walk to School Standard
As Trustee, Phil will push for a Safe Walk to School Standard. Phil will proactively inform Toronto Transportation Services regarding its school catchment, work with parents and staff to identify the most direct and convenient pedestrian and bicycle routes to school, and then formally request that the city upgrade them to prioritize the safety of kids walking or cycling to school. Phil will push for board-wide policies to make this standard practice across the TDSB. Phil and Matthew Kellway
Phil will work for Board-wide policies recognizing that students in every neighbourhood should have a local TDSB school that they can safely and conveniently walk to unaccompanied.
An Updated Policy on Busing (George Webster/Crescent Town)
Phil will work to amend the TDSB’s outdated and simplistic policy on bus transportation, which has led to the denial of bus service for George Webster students who live at Crescent Town. He’ll push for a policy that factors in issues like road safety and navigability (e.g., hills, narrow sidewalks, and icy conditions) of pedestrian routes when evaluating whether to provide bus service.
Special Education
The TDSB is falling well short of meeting its obligations to students with special needs or mental health challenges. Parents report a 2-3 year backlog in even the assessments required to determine what accommodations their children require to succeed in class.
Community Hubs that Keep Local Schools Open
Provincial governments place considerable pressure on the TDSB to close and sell off schools that we know are only temporarily underutilized. Phil Pothen will work to avoid school closures by establishing partnering with agencies that can use extra space to serve Beaches-East York neighborhoods, and help cover the cost of keeping school facilities open.
Phil was recently invited to present to Toronto’s Urban Issues Conference on the question of how school boards should deal with these demographic trends. While many TDSB schools in apartment and neighborhoods (e.g., Secord, Crescent Town) are permanently overcrowded, schools in neighborhoods dominated by single family homes experience cyclical changes in school-age population that leave them temporarily under capacity. In view of this pattern, selling off schools during low-points is reckless and short-sighted. Moreover, the justifications offered for these sell-offs do not hold up to scrutiny. Because the relevant schools tend to be situated in low-density neighborhoods, with limited development capacity, the present value of the land sold off is nowhere near enough to help offset the cost of purchasing much more expensive land in intensifying neighborhoods where new schools are needed.
Skilled Advocacy on Overcrowding and Disrepair
The last 20+ years of provincial governments have created a $7 billion disrepair backlog, saddled schools like Secord – and now Kew Beach and Kimberly with portables, and forced Crescent Town to ship 9 and 10 year olds to a school they can’t easily walk to.
While the Board has done a good job of publicizing these problems, we’re leaving a key tool on the table: the Planning Act requires adequate infrastructure – including school capacity – as a condition of upzoning, but TDSB policies arent clear enough to let staff testify that an overcrowded local school constitutes inadequate educational infrastructure. As a consequence, when the City approved a 37-story tower in a Ward 16 catchment set to be 200 students overcrowded, the Board actually seems to have informed the City that it had adequate capacity. Our policies do not recognize it a problem when the only available capacity is well beyond walking distance.
As trustee I will work to amend TDSB policies to recognize that adequate educational capacity means capacity within safe and convenient walking distance.